Humans of New York, the popular photography blog by Brandon Stanton, is arguably the most-loved page on Facebook. And when an offhand remark by a Brooklyn middle school student about his principal turned into a wildly successful $1.2 million-and-counting fundraising drive to send students on field trips to Harvard, that status seemed to cement itself in gilded bronze.
“This page is a triumph,” one commenter on Facebook said. Another said, “Raise your hand if you’ve cried pretty much every day since this story began.”
It all started when Stanton took a picture of Vidal, a student who cited his principal, Nadia L. Lopez, as his biggest influence. Inspired by the story, the HONY photographer then profiled numerous faculty members, and Ms. Lopez herself, ultimately starting a fundraiser as a form of outreach for the underserved community.
Unfortunately, the emotionally charged nature and success of the story obscure reality: It is policy change and financial sacrifice, not charity, that are needed to address long-running systemic inequalities in education that have made a joke out of Brown v. Board of Education and other efforts to level the playing field. A million dollars is simultaneously a powerful gesture – and a mere drop in the bucket.
The Humans of New York fundraiser does breathe new life into a burning question: Why are inner city schools with people of color so poor-performing? Conservatives point to the obstinate teachers unions and the subtly racist argument that funding is wasted, while liberals assert that not enough money is being thrown at the problem. But the roots of educational inequality are not so simple.
For one, 60 years after schools were formally desegregated, segregation has returned with a vengeance in de facto form. A ProPublica report tells of a dire situation in the South that has replicated itself in racially diverse areas around the country. Today, disadvantaged minorities see so few whites in their classrooms that it is as if schools were never legally desegregated in the first place. The “white flight” from public to private schools in Pasadena after desegregation was ordered in 1970 was so severe that it earned its place in both academic journals and the Wikipedia article on the subject. Despite the best efforts of school districts to bus students, integration is now largely fiction in most metropolitan areas.
Resegregation has a huge impact for low-income minority populations. To be brief, school segregation exacerbates a funding disparity because the white population in any given area almost always lives more well-off – and therefore pays more into the property taxes that fund schools – than disadvantaged minority groups. This has been the primary means by which education inequality has widened in the United States.
Furthermore, the loss of white students in public schools also means that the political power of their upper-middle-class parents to affect change or to call out problems is lost. Politicians are more likely to answer to the privileged, and poor minorities decidedly lack the wealth and political clout needed to affect change.
What will it take to change schools beyond feel-good stories and $30 donations? There needs to be a drastic effort at the state and local levels to reintegrate schools, since a divided government in Washington, D.C. will probably take little action. This will not be easy, because it requires a lucid understanding that white parents, well-meaning as they always are in trying to ensure that their children receive the best education, have been inadvertently avoiding minorities in the classroom for more than half a century. Perhaps some of the property taxes should be diverted to the inner city or the nearby struggling school – in other words, from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn or from Brentwood to Compton.
After all, if education in America is done right, we won’t need to shed any more tears or raise more funds. Brown v. Board was the product of decades of struggle and legal advocacy, not clicks and Facebook likes.